A discreet iPhone feature that arrived with iOS 10 could make the iMessages you send to family and friends more fun overall. One particular element is, if you’ll pardon my years of slang, “yes bomb”for emoji.
And no, I’m not talking about text bombs, that is, automatic text messages sent in rapid succession to bombard the target with a stream of pre-written messages. It’s about screen effects. They’ve been in Messages since iOS 10, but the effect that appears to have been created for emoji didn’t show up until iOS 11.
The trick that lets you send an emoji of an avalanche, an explosion, an echo, or whatever you want to call it, is showing on TikTok year after year, even if it’s been around since 2017. That doesn’t make it any less impressive, though.
To give an emoji an effect, enter up to three emojis, then press and hold the send button until a menu of hidden effects appears. Click “Screen”at the top and you should see the “Echo”screen effect, the first one on the list. That’s what you need. Click the submit button if you’re happy with the full-screen emoji effect.
Your emoji will then randomly multiply a character or group of characters across the entire background for about three seconds, filling the entire screen. If the recipient’s audio is heard, they will hear the normal send tone with a reverb echo that fades out when the effect ends.
The effect looks great with one, two, or three emojis, but you’ll just see the usual blue comment bubble echo on the screen if there are four or more. If you want to make the blue bubble echo more impressive, send more than four emojis to make the bubble bigger.
To make your presentation even cooler, leave some space between the emojis by inserting line breaks. You can even indent one or two characters to make it look more random on the screen.
If the echo doesn’t animate for you, you may have screen effects disabled. Go to Settings -> Accessibility -> Motion, then make sure “Autoplay Message Effects”is enabled. If this is already enabled, you can enable “Reduce Motion”in the same menu. Both can stop the animation from automatically playing, but you can always hit the play button on posts to start it manually.
These effects only work in iMessages, so if you try to send these emojis to your Android friends, they’ll just get emojis that say “Sent with echo”next to them.